Generous Ed, who will promise spending to stimulate growth, will make way for austere Ed in run up to general election
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Ed Balls scored a controversial penalty as Labour MPs beat journalists 3-0 on Sunday. Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images
Evan Davis showed on Monday morning why he is rapidly becoming a national treasure when he declined to question Ed Balls in any depth about his announcement of the day.
The Today programme interviewer had a simple argument: what is the point of talking about a policy that will never be introduced? Davis was much more interested in asking Balls what he would do if Labour wins the next general election.
So, with just a few seconds left in his Today programme interview, the shadow chancellor blurted out his announcement. This is that if Labour were in government now it would use the proceeds of the 4G mobile phone sell off to build 100,000 homes.
Davis, who says that economics and not politics is his comfort zone, put his finger on the two stage strategy Balls will follow in the run up to the next election. It goes as follows:
• Over the next two years Balls will announce a series of Keynesian measures that Labour would introduce, if it were in office, to stimulate growth. These are designed to create his fabled "dividing lines" between Labour and the Tories. Labour, in his eyes, would take action to stimulate growth while the coalition would press ahead with its cuts programme that has done so much to push Britain back into a double dip recession by cutting too far and too fast.
• In the run up to the 2015 general election, generous Ed will turn into austere Ed. He will announce that the economy is in such a parlous state - due to the coalition's cuts - that he sadly faces no choice but to accept the coalition's cuts programme for the first few years of the parliament. Balls gave a taste of this approach when he told Patrick Wintour last week that he would adopt a "zero-based" approach to spending.
In stage one Balls is laying the ground for the moment when, he hopes, the electorate reaches an irrevocable judgment that the coalition's deficit reduction plan has failed. In stage two, by which time this judgment will have been made, Balls will show that Labour has no choice but to adopt a responsible approach in light of the coalition's failings.
It will be a 2015 version of Gordon Brown's landmark declaration in the run up to the 1997 election that Labour would accept the Tory spending plans for the first two years of the new parliament.
This all looks great on paper. The challenge for Balls is to show that it passes the credibility test. Evan Davis seemed unconvinced. And Harriet Harman ran into trouble in a Spectator interview - when she suggested that a future Labour government would not accept the coalition's cuts - because she failed to clock that in two years time generous Ed will leave the stage to make way for austere Ed.